1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a wireless mobile terminal, and more particularly to a method for controlling the display of indicator icons in a wireless mobile terminal, whereby a user can set the display of indicator icons indicating states of the terminal or mobile phone such as a battery status and a received signal strength
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, a user with a wireless mobile terminal communicates information by means of voice communication or wireless Internet functions.
As wireless communication technologies have been developed, portable information terminals such as mobile phones or PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) comprise a communication function. Such portable information terminals will also generally be referred to as “wireless mobile terminals”, “mobile terminals” or the like. A display of the wireless mobile terminal has an indicator region (for example, at its upper portion) for displaying icons for indicating current states of the terminal such as a battery status, a received signal strength, call status, a roaming status, and alarm status.
As the number of functions increases, the number of status indicating icons required to be simultaneously displayed increases. However, a typical mobile terminal has a limited area of its display region, thereby restricting the number of displayable icons. Thus, in the case where there are many different kinds of indicators, it is necessary to omit part of the indicators in order of priority, or to reduce the sizes of the icons in order to increase the number of displayable icons. However, as the icon size decreases, it becomes difficult for the user to read the status of the icons and/or discriminate between icons.
Most information terminals of the prior art having a telephone communication function such as a mobile phone selectively display limited kinds of indicator icons due to the limited area of the indicator region of the display. In addition, when a new function is added, the conventional information terminal cannot display an indicator for the new function.
Further, some indicators such as a roaming indicator are hardly understood by general users. It would therefore be more desirable to allow users to replace such an indicator with a more useful indicator according to desires of each of the users. However, there is no mobile terminal allowing users to control the display of the indicators.